30 Years Ago, Penny Marshall & Cindy Williams Reunited 20 Years After Their ‘Unfortunate’ Parting on ‘Laverne & Shirley’
If the phrase “schlemiel, schlimazel” means anything to you, either you know some Yiddish or remember the theme song to the classic ABC sitcom Laverne & Shirley, which aired from 1976 to 1983. And as Laverne DeFazio and Shirley Feeney, actors Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams chanted those words one more time for The Laverne & Shirley Reunion, which aired on ABC three decades ago now, on May 22, 1995.
The reunion special marked 20 years since Marshall and Williams played Laverne and Shirley for the first time on an episode of Happy Days. The characters proved so appealing that they got their own sitcom, which followed the slapstick-heavy high jinks of these two Shotz Brewery bottle-cappers, best friends and roommates doing it their way in midcentury Milwaukee.
“It was the very first show that featured two single women who were blue-collar workers,” Malcolm Leo, executive producer of the special, told The Los Angeles Times. “They had adult concerns — trying to get by and improve themselves and fulfilling their dreams.”
The 1995 reunion special boasted clips from the show and interviews with the regular cast (which also included Michael McKean and David L. Lander) and guest stars — all “standard stuff,” as Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker wrote. “As sweeps-stunt memory-mongering goes, this is a well-made little special,” he added.
But as fans know, Marshall and Williams weren’t always BFFs, a fact barely mentioned in the special. “You’d have fights like families do,” Marshall said at one point.
And Marshall and Williams might not have been especially friendly during the 20th anniversary special either. In another review of the reunion, the Dallas Morning News’ Ed Bark said that “the two stars, who frequently feuded during the show’s later years, are all smiles in honor of the occasion,” but Tucker said Marshall and Williams “sit together on a couch while still managing to look miles away from each other.”
And Cinema Crazed’s Phil Hall also noticed the tension. “Brought together so many years later, the actresses’ cordiality to each other feels forced,” Hall wrote.
Marshall addressed her and Williams’ discord in her 2012 memoir, My Mother Was Nuts, saying she reached out to Williams after she heard that her former costar had separated from then-husband Bill Hudson. (Williams filed for divorce from Hudson in 2000, so it’s possible she and Marshall didn’t reconcile until that year.)
Jim Ober / ©ABC/Courtesy Everett Collection
“I was eager to reconnect,” Marshall wrote in the book, per MeTV. “I had seen Cindy once or twice over the years at TV Land specials, but these occasions were more professional than personal, always fleeting and in crowds. We never sat down and talked about the unfortunate way we had parted on Laverne & Shirley, or how much I had missed her over the years. I still considered her a friend. We had shared too much for me to consider her anything but a special person in my life.”
When Marshall reached out, Williams was busy with stage work, but the former costars eventually got their chance to talk it out. “After Cindy finished her play, we got together at my house and had the conversation I wished I’d been able to have 15 years earlier,” Marshall wrote, adding that they hashed out their issues during that talk and repaired their relationship.
In 2015, Williams discussed her and Marshall’s off-and-on-again friendship with Entertainment Tonight. “It’s like an Italian family at a dinner table on Sunday and somebody doesn’t pass the celery properly,” she said, per People. “There’s always going to be arguments.”
The Laverne & Shirley stars died within five years of each other — Marshall in 2018, Williams in 2023 — both at age 75. But fans should be gratified to know the sitcom’s stars got cozy again before their deaths. “I go to Penny’s house, I get in bed with her, and we watch TV,” Williams told ET. “She’s like my sister.”
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